Letters and Sounds 1

Letters and Sounds: Phase Three
4. Ask them to sound-talk ship and then chip and then to change ship into chip
on their magnetic whiteboards.
5. Ask them to sound-talk and blend the word to check that it is correct.
6. Repeat with each word in the list until the first word comes round again and then
say Full circle with the children.
Teaching and practising high-frequency
(common) words
There are 100 common words that recur frequently in much of the written material young
children read and that they need when they write. Most of these are decodable, by
sounding and blending, assuming the grapheme–phoneme correspondences are known,
but only 26 of the high-frequency words are decodable by the end of Phase Two and a
further 12 are decodable by the end of Phase Three. These are will, with, that, this,
then, them, see, for, now, down, look and too. Reading a group of these words
each day, by applying grapheme-phoneme knowledge as it is acquired, will help children
recognise them quickly. However, in order to read simple captions it is necessary also to
know some words that have unusual or untaught GPCs, ‘tricky’ words, and these need
to be learned (see Notes of Guidance for Practitioners and Teachers, page 15, for an
explanation).
he she we me be
• • • • • • • • •
Letters and Sounds: Principles and Practice of High Quality Phonics
Primary National Strategy
Learning to read tricky words
was my you her they all are
• • • • • • • •
Resources
■ Caption containing the tricky word to be learned.
Procedure
1. Explain that there are some words which have one or sometimes two tricky
letters in them.
2. Read the caption, pointing to each word, then point to the word to be learned
and read it again.
3. Write the word on the whiteboard.
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